Xunantunich Entrance Fee, Hours and the Hand-Cranked Ferry
Verified on 26 August 2026, against the National Institute of Culture and History’s own ticket store and its store API.
Xunantunich costs BZ$25.00 for a non-resident adult — that is Belize dollars, which is US$12.50 at Belize’s fixed 2:1 peg. A non-resident minor pays the same BZ$25.00; among non-residents, only children under 5 are free. The site is open every day, 8:00 am to 5:00 pm, including Sundays and public and bank holidays, and the last-entry rule depends on how you arrive: one hour before closing if you drive, one and a half hours before closing on foot.
The single most useful thing to know about this fee is which currency it is in. NICH’s store shows a bare “$25”, and in a country where the local dollar uses the same symbol, the page never says which dollar it means. Its store API does: BZD.
The fee, every category NICH publishes
| Ticket | Fee | US$ at the 2:1 peg |
|---|---|---|
| Non-Resident Adult | BZ$25.00 | US$12.50 |
| Non-Resident Minor | BZ$25.00 | US$12.50 |
| Non-Resident Minor under 5 | Free | — |
| Resident Adult | BZ$10.00 | US$5.00 |
| Resident Minor | BZ$10.00 | US$5.00 |
| Resident Minor under 12 | Free | — |
| Belizean Golden Citizen (65+) | Free | — |
Two things fall out of that table. There is no child discount for foreign visitors from the age of 5 upward — NICH’s free variation is worded “Non-Resident Minor under 5”, so a child aged exactly 5 pays the full adult BZ$25.00, and so does every non-resident minor above that. And at Xunantunich specifically, a non-resident adult pays 2.5 times the resident adult rate.
How we know it is BZ$, not US$
We did not infer the currency from the “$” symbol. NICH’s ticket store runs on WooCommerce, and its store API returns currency_code “BZD” with the symbol “$”. That is the check that settles it.
A dedicated Xunantunich guide site states the same thing in both currencies, verbatim: “The entrance fee for international visitors is US$12.50 per person, equivalent to BZ$25.” A separate travel page states the fee as “10 USD per person” — a figure NICH’s own store does not charge and which we are naming only to correct it; it is either an out-of-date fee or a BZ$/US$ mix-up, and the page itself gives no way to tell which. What NICH charged on 26 August 2026 is BZ$25.00.
Hours and the two last-entry cutoffs
NICH publishes the hours verbatim as “Open every day, from 8:00 am to 5:00 pm, including on Sundays and Public & Bank holidays”. The Sundays-and-holidays clause is NICH’s own wording, not an inference.
Last entry is published as a rule rather than a clock time: “One (1) hour before closing (driving); One and a half (1.5) hours before closing (pedestrians).” Applied to the published 5:00 pm close, that is 4:00 pm if you drive and 3:30 pm on foot. Those two clock times are our arithmetic on NICH’s rule, not separately quoted figures.
NICH publishes no reason for the split, and does not publish the distance from the ferry landing to the site entrance.
The hand-cranked ferry
NICH describes a visit as including “a scenic ride across the Mopan River on a hand-cranked ferry”, and publishes two operating rules for it: “all passengers must alight from vehicle” and “all horseback riders must dismount”. The alight rule means the crossing is made out of your vehicle, not sitting in it.
Ferry hours are unresolved. NICH publishes the site’s hours and both last-entry cutoffs but publishes no separate hours for the ferry. A third-party travel page gives them as approximately 8:00 to 16:00. We found no official source for ferry hours, and we are not going to convert one traveller’s account into a timetable.
We also found no official confirmation that the crossing is free. Several third-party sources say it is free with a tip appreciated; no NICH or government page we fetched says so, so we are not recording it as a fact.
What is actually at the top
The Belize Tourism Board describes the site as six (6) plazas with more than 25 Maya temples and palaces. The largest pyramid, El Castillo, is 130 feet above the plaza — the tourism board’s figure, given in feet only. A dedicated Xunantunich guide site gives the same 130 feet and adds the metric conversion, about 40 metres.
From the top, per the tourism board: “On a clear day, you can see across into nearby Guatemala and Caracol in the Mountain Pine Ridge Forest Reserve.”
The site sits atop a hill above San Jose Succotz village, reached by the ferry across the Mopan River, approximately 8 miles west of San Ignacio Town in the Cayo District.
Where BZ$25 sits among Belize’s Maya sites
All read from NICH’s own ticket store on the same day, non-resident adult rate:
| Site | Non-Resident Adult | US$ at the 2:1 peg |
|---|---|---|
| Xunantunich | BZ$25 | US$12.50 |
| Lamanai | BZ$25 | US$12.50 |
| Caracol | BZ$25 | US$12.50 |
| Cahal Pech | BZ$20 | US$10 |
| Altun Ha | BZ$20 | US$10 |
| Nohoch Ch’een (cave) | BZ$20 | US$10 |
| Barton Creek (cave) | BZ$20 | US$10 |
Xunantunich sits in the top band with Caracol and Lamanai. Resident adult rates are BZ$10 at Xunantunich, Lamanai, Cahal Pech and Altun Ha, and BZ$15 at Caracol — so the resident-to-visitor ratio is not the same at every site.
Two practical notes
Tickets can be bought online. NICH runs a site-ticket store covering Xunantunich and twelve other sites — El Pilar, Lubaantun, Cerro Maya, Santa Rita, Nim Li Punit, Caracol, Cahal Pech, Altun Ha, Lamanai, Serpon Sugar Mill, and the cave sites Nohoch Ch’een and Barton Creek. Its published contacts are +501-822-2106 (Belmopan) and +501-227-0811 (Belize City).
Cruise passengers are ticketed separately. NICH’s store returns a distinct “Xunantunich (Cruise Ship)” product alongside the standard Xunantunich ticket.
What the operators don’t publish
These are gaps in what NICH and the Belize Tourism Board publish, not ours:
- Official ferry operating hours, from NICH or any Belize government source.
- Official confirmation that the ferry is free of charge.
- Ferry vehicle capacity and crossing time, from any authoritative source.
- Who operates the ferry — NICH, the Ministry of Works, or the village. Left unstated on every page we fetched.
- The distance and gradient of the walk from the ferry landing to the site entrance. Only NICH’s separate pedestrian cutoff implies it is a meaningful walk.
- The effective date of the current BZ$25 non-resident fee. Belize’s archaeological-reserve fee increase was announced in a Belize Tourism Board document dated December 2023, but that fee-schedule PDF is a scanned image we could not parse, so we could not verify when the increase took effect and are not printing a date for it. The fee above is what NICH’s ticket store charged on the day we read it.
- Any guide requirement. Unlike ATM Cave, where NICH states in writing that a certified guide is mandatory, no page we fetched states a guide requirement at Xunantunich — and no NICH page states the opposite either.
How we researched this
Scope: this page reports source research, not an on-site test. We checked the booking systems, timetables and official sources named below on the date shown; calculations, unresolved disagreements and information we could not verify are labelled explicitly.
On 26 August 2026 we read NICH’s own Xunantunich ticket page and recorded every fee variation it sells, then queried NICH’s WooCommerce store API directly to confirm the currency code is BZD rather than assuming it from the “$” symbol. The comparison table was built the same way, the same day, from NICH’s ticket store for each named site. Hours, the two last-entry rules and the ferry rules are quoted verbatim from NICH; the 4:00 pm and 3:30 pm clock times are our arithmetic on NICH’s published close. Site description, El Castillo’s height and the view are from the Belize Tourism Board; the 8-mile distance from San Ignacio is from a dedicated Xunantunich guide site.
Where a figure in circulation disagrees with the authority, we have printed both and named the source of each.
Figures on this page labelled our arithmetic are calculated by us from the sourced inputs cited below — comparisons, percentages, multiples, differences, per-night and per-person conversions, running totals and currency conversions. Every other figure is reproduced as its named source published it. Where an operator or authority publishes a per-person or per-night rate directly, that is their figure and it is attributed to them at the point it appears.
Sources
- NICH — Xunantunich ticket page — all seven fee variations, opening hours, both last-entry rules, and the hand-cranked ferry description and its alight/dismount rules.
- NICH ticket-store API — the BZD currency code, and the separate “Xunantunich (Cruise Ship)” product.
- NICH site tickets — the online store, its site list and phone numbers, and the non-resident and resident rates for the comparison table, alongside the individual product pages for Cahal Pech, Altun Ha, Caracol, Lamanai, Nohoch Ch’een and Barton Creek.
- Belize Tourism Board — Xunantunich — six plazas and more than 25 temples and palaces, El Castillo at 130 feet, the view into Guatemala and Caracol, and the ferry-and-hilltop description.
- Xunantunich complete guide — the US$12.50 / BZ$25 equivalence, the 8-mile distance from San Ignacio, the 8:00 AM–5:00 PM hours, and the 130 ft / 40 m height.
- Pack Lightly — Xunantunich — the “10 USD per person” figure that does not match NICH.
- Thoroughly Travel — Xunantunich — the third-party “8:00 to 16:00” ferry hours.
- Belize Tourism Board fee schedule, December 2023 (PDF) — the fee-increase document we could not parse, which is why the effective date is recorded as unverified.
Last verified: 2026-08-26. Entrance fees and hours change without notice.
Written by Estuardo Enriquez. This site is independent, carries no affiliate relationship with any operator named here, and is not connected to any previous owner of this domain.